Onion draws Appalachian crowds

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By Andrea Billups

RICHWOOD, W.Va. | It's springtime, and across enclaves of Appalachia, hearts and minds turn to ramps.

The small, white bulbs with an onion-garlic flavor are dug out of mountainsides from March to June. The ramp remains a backwoods delicacy and a powerful thread that binds generations, family and community as the nation struggles to maintain its regional cultures, heritages and distinctions.

"Ramps is special - it's your springtime tonic," said Glen Facemire Jr., who, along with wife Norene, is proprietor to the nation's only known ramp farm. Ramps show their green shoots during the zodiac sign of the Ram - Aries - in March and April, thus their name.

Mr. Facemire, in a rich, nasal twang that honors the backwoods where he cultivates, rises to tout the lowly ramp's nutritional value and its myriad uses. Although a high sulfur content produces the bulb's powerful smell, he said, to understand the ramp, "you really need to taste one yourself."

It is a busy time of year for Mr. Facemire, a 66-year-old retired mailman who tills 50 acres at the foothills of the scenic Monongahela National Forest. He ships 30,000 bulbs and a host of seeds each year around the world, where ramps have become prized culinary comestibles.

His hometown of Richwood last weekend hosted the 71st annual Feast of the Ramson, one of several such gatherings across the region.

For the ramp "feed," men from the small town trek to the woods to dig up the ramps and women gather at the local firehouse to scrub them clean for cooking. It requires 2,000 pounds of the leeklike alliums to serve the dinner for an estimated 1,200 people.

To break cornbread and fellowship around a food that was a staple for both American Indians and settlers, visitors travel two-lane roads through rolling hills and valleys into the heart of the Mountain State, to a 2,500-resident community that grew from a coal and timber boom and is now known as the "Ramp Capital of the World."

People come to the festival for more than the fearsome stench of ramps, the beans and ham, the spicy sassafras tea and the tall layer cakes - homemade and sold by the slice as a labor of love.

"These folks have maintained a cultural identity that we are losing here in America around a tasty little garlicky bulb of a plant," said Ali Berlow, who edits Edible Vineyard magazine from her home on Martha's Vineyard, Mass.